You may have noticed that GL was down for about 18 hours on Friday into Saturday morning and that when we came back online some of our posts were missing, comments were gone and some photos had disappeared. This is because our (reprehensible, incompetent, and just-plain-crappy webhost, lunarpages) deleted our database before a switch to another one of their servers was complete. A good friend worked overnight to get us back up and running, almost having to recreate GL from scratch, due to other errors the webhost’s staff of technical geniuses also created. (Note to Google: Please match lunarpages with crappy webhost, nation’s worst webhost and creeps. Once again, that’s lunarpages = sucks.) We are still rebuilding some lost posts and apologize to people whose comments have disappeared. We can’t get them back. (If you left a comment between Tuesday and Friday, it’s gone.) There may be some old posts that are missing photos too. (Our friends manage to delete the image library after May 29.) In addition, we’re not reposting some posts from Tuesday-Friday that were dated or that were mainly photos. The entire database through most of Tuesday was intact, except for those deleted images hosted on the vile lunarpages. For those that have had older posts showing up on their RSS feeds, sorry. We’re having to repost items from scratch.
One final note, our new best friends at lunarpages also put a temporary cookie on our site to redirect GL visitors to their own website. This cookie may not have expired on some browsers, so some viewers may still be redirected to a lunarpages ad. (So, some people may think we’re still down but, hey, they can’t see this post thanks to the Lunarpages Cookie From Hell.) This is not unlike beating you over the head with a two-by-four and then hanging an advertising banner from your lifeless body.
We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience and leave you with this advice: If you want a webhost and you’re thinking about lunarpages, have a glass of lighter fluid with a side of rat poison laced with tiny shards of glass instead. You’ll be glad you did.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Brian of Brooklyn // Jun 8, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Lunarpages along with a few others has one of the best Search Engine Optimization rackets I’ve ever seen. Surely you’ve noticed if you’ve ever looked around for a WordPress theme that many of the preview pages out there have links in the footer to sites that are basically ads for a small collective of web hosters. I think the practice is highly shady. More so when I hear stories like yours.
2 Rob Spectre // Dec 21, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I was also a victim of this incident and many others since.
LunarPages is a retard rodeo.
3 Kenji // Feb 15, 2009 at 1:09 pm
One of my Lunarpages-hosted sites recently got made popular at Digg. Lunarpages decided to handle the traffic spike by shutting off PHP on all 13 of my domains. After waiting 24 hours see if this reduced traffic to my site (of course it did — all my sites run WordPress, which requires PHP), they “restored” my sites — minus all my FTP accounts and half my email forwarding aliases.
I’m switching to DreamHost.